That morning she found a fairly comfortable room, more within her means, on the north side in the boarding house district.  She unpacked and hung up her clothes and drifted down town again, idly.  It was noon when she came to the corner of State and Madison streets.  It was a maelstrom that caught her up, and buffeted her about, and tossed her helplessly this way and that.  The corner of Broadway and Forty-second streets has been exploited in song and story as the world’s most hazardous human whirlpool.  I’ve negotiated that corner.  I’ve braved the square in front of the American Express Company’s office in Paris, June, before the War.  I’ve crossed the Strand at 11 p.m. when the theatre crowds are just out.  And to my mind the corner of State and Madison streets between twelve and one, mid-day, makes any one of these dizzy spots look bosky, sylvan, and deserted.

The thousands jostled Terry, and knocked her hat awry, and dug her with unheeding elbows, and stepped on her feet.

“Say, look here!” she said, once futilely.  They did not stop to listen.  State and Madison has no time for Terrys from Wetona.  It goes its way, pellmell.  If it saw Terry at all it saw her only as a prettyish person, in the wrong kind of suit and hat, with a bewildered, resentful look on her face.

Terry drifted on down the west side of State Street, with the hurrying crowd.  State and Monroe.  A sound came to Terry’s ears.  A sound familiar, beloved.  To her ear, harassed with the roar and crash, with the shrill scream of the crossing policemen’s whistle, with the hiss of feet shuffling on cement, it was a celestial strain.  She looked up, toward the sound.  A great second-story window opened wide to the street.  In it a girl at a piano, and a man, red-faced, singing through a megaphone.  And on a flaring red and green sign: 

     BERNIE GOTTSCHALK’S MUSIC HOUSE!

     COME IN!  HEAR BERNIE GOTTSCHALK’S LATEST
     HIT!  THE HEART-THROB SONG THAT HAS GOT ’EM ALL! 
     THE SONG THAT MADE THE KAISER CRAWL!

     “I COME FROM PARIS, ILLINOIS, BUT OH! 
     YOU PARIS, FRANCE!

     I USED TO WEAR BLUE OVERALLS BUT
     NOW ITS KHAKI PANTS_.”

     COME IN!  COME IN!

Terry accepted.

She followed the sound of the music.  Around the corner.  Up a little flight of stairs.  She entered the realm of Euterpe; Euterpe with her back hair frizzed; Euterpe with her flowing white robe replaced by soiled white boots that failed to touch the hem of an empire-waisted blue serge; Euterpe abandoning her lyre for jazz.  She sat at the piano, a red-haired young lady whose familiarity with the piano had bred contempt.  Nothing else could have accounted for her treatment of it.  Her fingers, tipped with sharp-pointed grey and glistening nails, clawed the keys with a dreadful mechanical motion.  There were stacks of music-sheets on counters, and shelves, and dangling from overhead wires.  The girl at